Baked beans with meat? How about every type of Bush’s Baked Beans, except Veggie They are all flavored with pork or bacon.
Colophon, making a roux --> white sauce --> cheese sauce is cool if you know how. Give a lousy cook that recipe, and you’ll have burnt brown lumpy cheese goop over your macaroni. It’s near impossible to screw up the highly processed stuff, unless you consider the final product to be a screw up in its own right.
Yes, macaroni and cheese can be made from scratch. But KRAFT mac n cheese cannot. They are two different foodstuffs.
KRAFT mac n cheese combined with veggie beans is heaven.
Forgot… Kraft® Mac and Cheese is also good straight up, by the box directions, with an added can of whole canned tomatoes, juice and all. As Alton would say… “That’s good eats!”
How you could ever screw up a cheese sauce after you’ve made it maybe 3 times is beyond me. A cheese sauce is one of the easiest things in the world to make if you’ve mastered the 3 basic steps of stir, pour and wait.
I’ll second that. Macaroni cheese was one of my favourites as a kid and it was probably the first “proper” dish that my mum taught me to make. I can still never get it quite as tasty as she did though…
Do YOU want to eat one of those first three “creations”? Like the runny mess where the cook said “I wonder if I put enough flour in the butter.” Or the over floured goop on the next pass… :barf:
The prepackaged stuff is nearly fool proof AND you don’t have to go through a bunch of steps to finish the sauce, you can do other things, like sit on the couch, drink a beer and scratch your butt. Perfect for your average Lazy American™. 
All this talk has me wanting to make some mac and cheese from scratch today.
**Colophon[/b[ - you can buy Kraft Mac & Cheese here. It’s sold in Safeways as Kraft Cheesy Pasta alongside the Batchelor’s dried Pasta 'n Sauce range. It comes out orange, but it’s pretty cool convenience food.
Darn. Now I’m all hungry again. A’shopping I will go…seriously, Colophon, try it with diced Ortega chilis mixed in. Just the right amount of tang. Something to make while I watch the Dodgers destroy the Red Sox this afternoon. 
It’s flour, butter, milk and cheese. It’s not like you’ve ruined $200 worth of foie gras or something. Personally, I think the problem is that a generation of people have grown up without living in a household which cooks every day. With a few basic principles under your belt, things like instant cheez sauce and instant mashed potato look like lunacy but without it, your stuck with it because you just don’t know any better.
I agree Shalmanese. Just to set the record a bit straight though, I usually cook most everything from scratch. From BBQ sauce with either a base of molasses or tomato paste, to shrimp gumbo. At times though ( like 11pm ), it’s just inconvienient to start a sauce for a snack. 
-K
I just played with my Mac and Cheese for the first time 2 days ago. I added salsa con queso to it and ate it as a side dish with pizza and it was damn good.
My sister used to eat it with peas which was good, but it never seemed as good with the peas as it did without so I never add them myself.